• Maxon Cinema 4D

  General confusion about re-texturing objects after baking

  Posted by Hilary Tsai on February 4, 2021 at 8:01 am

  First, a general knowledge question about baking which has always confused me. If you want to bake materials prior to doing an fbx export, are you supposed to re-load the baked textures into a new material in C4D, replace the new material on the object, and then export the fbx for it to come out accurately? Or is it that you need to reload the baked materials into your secondary software? For example, I’m exporting an fbx for use in SparkAR. There’s no way to translate every part of the baked material into a new one in in Spark because the textures don’t work the same way as C4D, and don’t include channels like transparency or surface color which I would need to load the baked layers in. This is what gave me the impression that most people bake and then re-texture the object within C4D before exporting. Is this completely off? It has always confused me.

  Secondly, I want to use the bake material tag to bake out the color, reflectance, alpha and transparency properties of an object. From what I’ve heard, surface color is the way to get reflectance, so I checked on surface color in addition to reflection, alpha, color and transparency. I have hdri objects with a hide from camera tag that should be included in the reflections. I made sure single file was unchecked. When I went to load my baked texture layers, I was confused as to what gets loaded where. There’s no channel for surface color, so where does my surface color layer go? I heard it might be the diffusion channel? And then I assume I just load the alpha, transparency and reflective layers into their respective channels in the new material.

  However, when I did this, my texture came out totally transparent, with no color or reflectiveness. Then I remembered that baking doesn’t work without first generating a UV map, which is another topic I struggle with. So I figure this might be what’s causing the problem. However, I’m also unsure if I’m doing the re-texturing correctly. I still am not positive which layers go into which channels when the baking options do not match up exactly. Does “reflection” in the bake material tag translate directly into “reflectance” in the material, for instance? And what is the difference between “illumination” and “ambient occlusion” in the bake material tag?

  I know these are a lot of questions, and I apologize for getting so confusing. But I feel like I’m missing something here, and any insight into the above questions should help me on the path to setting it straight.

  Hilary Tsai replied 5 years, 7 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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